Friday, June 20, 2014

God's not hard of hearing, pal.

So, there you are, happy with yourself for securing a seat in the emergency exit row (aka "Redneck First Class") and all stretched out catching some Z's, when you are abruptly awakened from a sound sleep by the member of the Junior Muezzin League above.

I'm thinking it's only grogginess that saved Ahmed from a startled nut punch, but maybe that's just me imputing my thoughts and reactions to our impromptu videographer. Look, I don't care if somebody jumps to the exit door and starts
inviting me to the Methodist Fish Fry at the top of his lungs: It's
rude, freaky, and disturbing. Normal people don't do that.

Now I understand that your religion requires you to pray x number of times per day, but there are specific instructions and dispensations for doing so in unusual circumstances so that you don't either drive those around you up the wall or startle the feces out of them, as the case may be.

In other words, you're just doing this because you've got the right to* and you're gonna exercise it and In Your Face, fellow paying passengers!

5 times a day, unless something intervened. They do not make up prayers either as they have a little book they read from. They also touch their head to a little rock that comes from the sand in a given spot.

It always puzzled me, after reading up on the requirements for the ritual (among them being clean and having on clean clothes) and having lived there for a time ..... how anybody ever got any work done in the Middle East, if they stopped whatever they were doing, got out of their sweat stained clothers and washed up at dawn, noon, mid- and late afternoon and sunset.

The extremists will shoot people in the back of the head for not doing the ritual properly, yet there is not enough water or laundry soap in the entire world to have clean clothes on in the sandbox 5 times a day ......

...... granted, not a whole lot gets done between noon and late afternoon- the arabs probably have an equivalent word for "siesta"- but seriously: no wonder they are stuck in the seventh century- a four to six hour workday in a land of near constant tribal and sectarian warfare, poor infrastructure and spotty water and electrical service is not exactly conducive to productivity .....

Look, I get religious requirements, I do. I'm Catholic. However, I have never felt the urge to break into Gregorian chant in public, much less in an ordinarily quiet sort of place.

Well, aside from when I was a bookseller in college during the height of the DaVinci Code madness, and got saddled with a customer who spent ten minutes pitching a fit at me for shelving the stupid thing in "Fiction" rather than "Current Events."

Y'see, the Vatican's army of albino assassin monks were chasing Dan Brown around to keep him from publishing his next expose of them, or some such, so we owed it to him to at least shelve his book correctly, or some such. Which, having read the wretched book and being utterly disinterested in any more of Mr. Brown's drivel, I would have considered as good a use as any for an order of albino assassin monks, but I digress. When I finally got away from the idiot, who was quite personally offensive on the subject of corporate-directed book-categorizing policies, I confess to stepping into the next aisle and quite properly intoning "Miserere nobis" , which sent the moron scuttling out of the store at top speed.

Huh. Pretty sure you don't actually need a muezzin to do the daily prayers. It's tradition, yes, but it's kinda like church bells - they exist for a reason, to call the faithful to prayer. But if I'm saying vespers or matins on a flight, I'm not required to have my tablet imitate the sound of the bells at max volume.

As for 'why are Arab/Muslim countries so backwards', you can thank the victory of the Sunnis ('secondary causes deny Allah's omnipotence') over the Shias ('y'know, there might be something to this observation and experimentation thing'), wiping out the nascent Shia university-analogues, and any application of Aristotelian thought.

A while back my random web surfing arrived at a travel board and a discussion on fulfilling Islamic prayer requirements on commercial flights. Interesting stuff. The consensus seemed to be "do the best you can without annoying your fellow passengers, and Allah will understand."

In all my years in the Middle East -- regularly taking commercial flights for a while -- I never encountered that. People crowding into the aisles to pray, yeah; but muezzin-boy freaking out? Never.

As for the open carry analogy, to be an accurate equivalent, the OC folks would have to blow off a mag or two and scream orders at the top of their lungs to buy and carry guns. Even the obnoxious OCers are more like guys getting down on the sidewalk blocking traffic.